NEW DELHI: Affordable housing in the capital city of Delhi could get a major boost with the centre notifying norms for the land pooling policy, a decision welcomed by the industry.

The decision can bring down the land prices in Delhi and solve housing problems for the economically weaker sections.

The Centre, on Tuesday, notified the operational guidelines for putting to use the Land Pooling Policy of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). The policy itself was notified a year and a half back.

"Delhi may be able to unlock its potential for real estate development across 20,000 hectares of land concentrated across peripheral zones," Anshuman Magazine, chairman and managing director, CBRE South Asia said.

However, since most of the land falling under this policy is in remote and peripheral areas of Delhi, infrastructure development in these areas will take time and immediate housing solution may not be possible.

"This policy will make available more land for housing, bringing down land price prevailing in Delhi," said RK Arora, chairman of Supertech.

"This likely to result in a healthy availability of residential dwelling units which will not only enable availability but also help in keeping a control on residential prices," said Rohan Sharma, associate director-research and real estate intelligence service, JLL India.

Developers like Prateek Group are looking forward to the implementation of the policy. "As developers we would be eagerly waiting for the policy to turn out the way it is planned. The effects on Delhi's realty will be very clearly visible once this activity starts," said Prashant Tiwari, chairman, Prateek Group.

Now the Delhi government has to notify 95 villages, mostly in southwest, west and north Delhi, as development areas. The government has to declare 89 of these villages as urbanised.

The DDA had proposed the policy to have private sector participation in land consolidation and development while DDA itself assumed a larger role of a facilitator.

According to the policy, those who provide DDA with larger land parcels will benefit more. On contributing 2-20 hectares, the land owners will be compensated with land parcels measuring 48% of the original. Those contributing 20 hectares or more, the compensatory plots will be 60% of the original plot. The owners will be allowed to build residential, commercial, public and semi-public facilities on these alternative plots.

Mumbai: Nipun Sahni, former managing director and head, India, real estate investment group at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch has joined US-based Apollo Global Management as partner and head of real estate, India